The shortage is getting worse, not better
The aviation industry is not short of passengers or planes. It is short of people to keep the planes flying. Aviation Industry Association NZ chief executive Simon Wallace was blunt when he told the NZ Herald this week that the engineer shortage is deteriorating: “There is still a shortage and the shortage is getting worse.”
The scale of the competition New Zealand faces is set out in a Boeing forecast that the world will need 2.4 million more commercial aviation professionals over the next 20 years. That is not a domestic hiring problem. It means New Zealand is bidding for a thin talent pool against every airline, maintenance operation and air force on the planet, most of them able to pay more.
The maths that keeps getting worse
This is a structural gap, not a cyclical wobble. Joint modelling published in 2024 by AIANZ and the Ringa Hora Services Workforce Development Council put hard numbers on it for the first time. New Zealand needs roughly 100 additional pilots per year on average, with demand rising 2 to 3 percent annually.
The engineering picture is worse. The workforce is projected to grow at just 1 percent over the decade against industry growth of about 3 percent. Worse still, from 2024 workforce entries were forecast to grow at 1.4 percent a year while exits ran at 3 percent a year, a sustained net loss without intervention. Every year of inaction widens the gap and makes it harder to close.
In that 2024 release, Wallace summed up a decade of talking past governments: “After more than a decade of working with successive governments to address this issue, we now have the hard evidence to make a case for change.”
The training pipeline is lopsided
The Tertiary Education Commission pushed back, and it has real figures. There were 465 equivalent fulltime students in aerospace and aircraft maintenance programmes in 2025, up 10 percent year on year and 30 percent above 2022. Enrolments for the start of 2026 were up again.
But classroom enrolments are a lead indicator. Apprenticeships produce job-ready engineers, and that pipeline has not recovered. TEC deputy chief executive Gillian Dudgeon conceded work-based learner numbers have remained relatively flat. The count sat at 560 in 2025, still below the 595 recorded in 2022. The industry and TEC are each pointing at the other as the bottleneck, and the numbers keep sliding.
Cost is throttling supply at the entry point too. The 2024 research noted pilot training reaching up to $120,000 for a two-year course, with students expected to self-fund at least $50,000 beyond a student loan cap of $35,000 that has not moved since 2013.
Migration is a lever, not a strategy
Immigration is not the fix. Wallace noted it is “also very expensive to bring a migrant worker in”. Relocation and paperwork costs mean only large operators can use it regularly, leaving regional carriers and smaller maintenance firms exposed. Getting engineers onto the immigration green list helped at the margins, but the answer is training more New Zealanders, and institutes are already turning applicants away for lack of funded places.
The six-tonne penalty on every long-haul flight
This is where the workforce gap stops being an HR line item and becomes physical infrastructure. The RNZAF Ohakea base, the country’s backup runway when Auckland or Christchurch are unavailable, has been unstaffed overnight since the pandemic. Because it cannot operate overnight, long-haul flights into New Zealand must carry an extra six tonnes of fuel as a diversion contingency, on every flight, indefinitely.
As reported in January 2026, Board of Airline Representatives NZ executive director Cath O’Brien said “a lack of rescue crew and firefighters limits the number of planes that could enter the country”. A staffing gap at one base is quietly capping national air capacity and burning fuel across the entire long-haul network.
Who pays downstream
The flow-on effects are concrete. Tourism operators need reliable seat capacity, and more aircraft downtime means fewer flights and higher fares suppressing inbound numbers. Exporters of time-sensitive freight such as seafood, cut flowers and pharmaceuticals rely on belly space on passenger aircraft, so fewer flights mean tighter capacity and dearer rates. Regional carriers like Air Chathams, the last link for many communities, are least able to absorb the hit. Search and rescue and medical evacuation services depend on the same shrinking pool.
Wallace’s verdict was flat: “It’s disappointing. The problem just gets worse.” With entries running below exits and the apprenticeship pipeline still short of pre-Covid levels, that trajectory does not turn on its own. Fund the training places, lift the loan cap, and the gap narrows. Keep talking, and the next few years’ recovery will be capped by the people the country never trained.
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